Post #84: Pricing the Priceless

oil on canvas 25"x34 2/3"

I’m one of the least competent people I know about the’ business’ of art.  I tend to think of art as a “calling,” a vow of poverty one takes when joining a religious order. I think that any artist who works with sales in mind is corrupted whether they realize it or not. Of course there are plenty of artists whose work has lots of sales appeal without even trying. They’re lucky; they don’t need to compromise. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.

The hardest part for me is that when I do find a buyer and they ask me how much I want for my work, I begin to stammer, don’t have a clue. Uh! What do you want to give me? That, cleverly, takes the onus of a business transaction off me. Most of the time, my prospective purchaser doesn’t fall for the ploy; he or she hands the ball right back to me. I need to give them a number.

oil on canvas 26"x35 1/2"

Several years ago, a friend came to my studio, pointed to a pair of large paintings (a diptych) I had just completed and announced: “I want to buy them.” I panicked. a) I didn’t know if I wanted to sell them (too new) and b) as usual, I had no idea what to charge. And so I vacillated; hoping she would  change her mind. First, I wanted to see how they looked in her New York apartment. I offered to roll the canvases up and ship them to her so she could pin them on the wall and decide whether she really wanted them or not. I figured they would never go with the more traditional (scenes of Venice and the Seine) paintings she owned and she would send them back, saving me the problem of having to come up with a price. When they arrived at her apartment, I came into the City and we tried the work out in various rooms. Surprisingly, they looked great; even managed to look comfortable with her other paintings. Then came the dreaded moment; what did I want for them? I had just completed the pair and had not had time to decide if I really like them, so the asking price in my head was fairly low. (I never price paintings based on what I think the buyer can pay.)  I struck a deal: I would write down what I wanted on a piece of paper and she would put down what she wanted to pay. We would split the difference. As I anticipated, she got a “bargain” and I got more than I expected. It was a win for both of us. The work (expensively framed) looks great in her living room.

Another way I get around having to price paintings is to give them to my friends on “Long-term Loan,” Better over someone’s fireplace than in my attic, I always figure. So far, I haven’t done too well with that ploy; in fact, possession being 9/10s of the law, I rarely get the painting back. The borrowers move away (far away) or die (the heirs don’t know me from a hole in the wall.) One of my favorite paintings got taken out of an apartment when the property was repossessed for non-payment of rent. The “friend” who did this to me is perplexed as to why I am upset when he’s perfectly willing to borrow something else to replace it. No thanks

oil on canvas 26"x36"

I decided to ask my artist friends how they priced their work and their replies varied. Some based the number on the amount of work and time they had put into the piece. Others, on what they thought someone would pay. A few said that people (mostly rich ignoramuses) thought that the more they paid, the better the work. Other factors enter in. If the art is sold through a gallery, that triples the price but not what the artist gets.  Some buyers like to “bargain,” so with them you have to start higher so they can think they got a deal. It’s like haggling at a bazaar.

And then there are people like me who don’t like to sell their work. It’s not that we can’t use the money (I certainly could).

My reasoning goes as follows:

As an unknown female (Strike 1) of advanced years (Strike 2), living in the suburbs (Strike 3), my work has very little value in the art market. In order for it to be worth anything, I need a “reputation” and I’m never going to get one if my best work is gone – sold or strayed. And don’t say I can always borrow it back for a show. Practically every time work leaves my house, it disappears for good. My artist son tells me Noguchi, the sculptor, used to hide anything he really liked and create a copy to sell. The buyer, never having seen the original, was happy with what he got. He told me this story during a discussion about my recent, more “saleable” work, poetic scenes from my daughter’s New York City windows. No raunchy women with their butts exposed, only rooftop water towers painted in lovely, muted colors against a cloud-filled sky. So far, everyone who has seen them wants to buy one. Maybe I should make prints on canvas. Everyone tells me giclee prints on canvas are now almost indistinguishable from the original.

oil on canvas 25 1/2"x35 1/2"

I envy artists who can treat their work as a standard business transaction (x number of hours labor, cost of materials etc and then factor in % profit.)  The problem is, it doesn’t work for most artists. The price of a work of art has too many variables and that’s why we go to art dealers who know the market and  how the game is played. There’s a saying in the art world that two people are needed to make a work of art: the person who creates it and the person who takes it away from him.

Most artists I know don’t need to sell their work to survive, though they are too serious and too competent to be considered hobbyists. They would like to make at least enough money to cover their expenses but you won’t find them homeless if they don’t. In a way, they are fortunate; they have the latitude to do what they want without worrying about buyers. On the other hand, I know artists (the proverbial garret dwellers) who survive below the poverty level. The problem is that even a garret nowadays costs a small fortune and it gets harder and harder to suffer for one’s art.

POST #83: PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN (and Life)

In Post #82, I asked my readers to let me know what topics were of interest to them. Most responded that I should keep doing what I was doing; they just seemed to enjoy my jaundiced view of The Artist’s Life in Fairfield County.

But my sculptor son, Ned, had a specific request. He wanted me to elaborate on something I had taught him when he was still in high school. He remembered my saying that a work of art should flow, move the eye around the canvas. The artist needed to create a visual path for the viewer, whether through line, shape or color. He said this was a valuable piece of information I had given him that he had never heard from any of his other teachers. He was thinking about it a lot lately, relating it to the way the body functioned. A living entity needs to “flow,” just like a successful painting. You could call it “chi,” “meridians” “circulation” or “chakras”; the Principles of Design I taught him all those years ago were, as Ned observed, intimately connected to his life.

I don’t know if they still teach these concepts in art school, but they were right up there with drawing, painting and art history when I studied art. I remember spending countless days moving pieces of colored paper around a page, trying to illustrate principles such Balance, Center of Interest, Rhythm, Unity and of course, Eye Movement, There were no “right answers,” no “correct” arrangements, just an intuitive sense that the universe was in order and everything was placed exactly where it belonged. The course I took: Introduction to Two Dimensional Design, probably came from the ideas of the early 20^th century Russian Constructivists, Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitsky 

But back to Ned’s observation that the Principles of Design manifest themselves in the way our body functions. For example, the need for a “Center of Interest,” a starting point that dominates everything might represent the heart. “Balance” is not just a physical phenomenon that keeps us upright, but is important in our emotional life as well. “Flow” or “Movement.” “Repetition”, “Variety”, “Unity” are human truisms that exist both in life and art.

In order to demonstrate to my classes how the Principles of Design worked, I would project a slide onto the blackboard, usually an accepted masterpiece like the Mona Lisa or Brueghel’s “Wedding Dance”. Then, with chalk, I would outline the shapes, show how they interact and also how the smallest change was all it took to spoil the perfection of the art. I would often use the analogy of a seesaw and the delicate balance that enables it to function – and how easy it is to lose this balance . 

Meanwhile, all you artists, follow the Principles of Design! If you’re interested, there’s lots of literature on the subject. The Principles apply to everything that ails you: your body, your life and your art!

P.S. The images in this post were all created by the overhead projector.

Post #82: Picking up Dropped Threads

Rooftop Scene
Oil on Canvas, 2015,  23 1/2" by 34 1/2" (unstretched)

Eons ago, in Post #19, I wrote about the six weeks I spent in my daughter’s spare bedroom recovering from a broken ankle. With nothing to distract me, I made “lemonade” out of the down time by drawing the view from her large window on the 11^th floor overlooking West End Avenue. For the first time in my life, I was able to fully concentrate, go “into the zone” (Post #71: Flow and More Flow). I spent at least six hours a day drawing and redrawing the same buildings, getting “better” all the time. I felt like Monet or the Italian artist, Giorgio Morandi, who did endless, exquisite images of rows of bottles. 

Rooftop Scene
Charcoal on Toned Canvas, 2015   24"x36"

But then I recovered, came home and went back to my usual large, satirical paintings, “Weimar in Stamford.” The West End Avenue rooftop drawings lay untouched in a portfolio for several years. A couple of months ago, however, after completing a series of eight canvases (6’x4’) that cover the walls of an entire room, I found myself depleted. Since I needed some downtime, I decided to go back to a ‘dropped thread,’ the scenes from my daughter’s window, to turn the sketches into actual paintings.

Untitled
Oil on Canvas, 2015 - 40"x36" (unstretched)

Architectural renderings are not my thing - I barely passed Drafting in college. I needed to concentrate on the expressive quality of the views, rather than how they actually looked. I found some pieces of canvas in the closet, much smaller than what I usually use, toned them with a sepia wash and proceeded to place charcoal versions of my drawings on them. The first few were pretty realistic, like the originals, but then, the paintings began to take on a life of their own. Size relationships no longer mattered; perspective came out of my head, not a formula. Color? Not much. By the time I got to the fifth and sixth paintings, the work became even more surreal; in fact, when I started them, I had no idea what I was going to do. These were dream states, not photographs.

Rooftop Scene, Oil on Canvas 2015

Anyhow, I think I’m finished with rooftops; at least for a while. I’m not even sure I like what I have done. Some of the paintings are more nightmares than dreams. Is that man planning to jump off the roof, or is he just looking down? Time to go back to over endowed ladies and lecherous men.

POST #81: I CONSUME; THEREFORE I EXIST

I had a friend (long deceased) who used to go to Lord & Taylor every day (and I literally mean “every day.”) It’s not that she needed anything; her house and her closets were full but she found that shopping provided a “fix,” a way of getting away from everything that was going wrong in her life: her marriage, her crazy children, erratic lovers and so forth. It lowered her anxiety level, calmed her down.

About a year ago,  I wrote a blog entitled “Thrift Shop Therapy,” citing psychologist Erich Fromm’s theory that shopping (consumption) reduced anxiety and averted a societal nervous breakdown. I wonder what he would think about current forms of on-line shopping, even more pervasive and insidious ways to consume. “Instant Gratification”: Amazon can now deliver to your door within 24 hours. We used to call it “recreational shopping,” although “therapeutic shopping” was probably closer to the truth. We consume therefore we exist; if we stop consuming, we die. The package on the doorstep is life-affirming. Fortunately, when I tried to sign up for an Amazon account a couple of years ago, I was told that my credit card was “not valid.” Trust me, my credit card was valid…too valid. I took it as a sign from on high not to become an on-line shopper.

I have a friend who is addicted to on-line shopping, buying “bargains” whether she needs them or not. She recently informed me (gleefully) that she found her favorite sneakers “on line” for “half price” and ordered three pairs (she already has several.) It took a lot of restraint for me not to point out that she was never going to live long enough to wear out the sneakers she already owns.

In Post #33, I wrote about my love of thrift shops and tag sales, which I believe comes from a totally different place than recreational or therapeutic shopping. It appears to be a common condition among artists; I’m always running into one I know. We seem to need more visual stimulation than the average human being and, living in the suburbs, comfortable as it is, provides very little. It’s not like a city, with its ever-changing kaleidoscope of shapes, faces, signs and colors. The suburbs are visually boring: pleasant enough, peaceful, but boring. I love tag sales and thrift shops, not because I need anything – my closets, like everyone else I know – are packed with clothes and my house is filled to the brim with “objects d’art.” But I go out looking, at least once a week because I need the visual and social stimulation. It’s a chance to meet friends, old and new and, when the tag sale season rolls in, find myself in places I would ordinarily never visit.

Department stores and malls don’t satisfy the need for visual stimulation. They are too predictable, too formulaic. As soon as you walk in, you know exactly where everything is, what it’s going to look like and how much it will cost. On the other hand, thrift shops and tag sales are always filled with surprises. There’s a surge of adrenaline, a frisson of excitement when you walk through the door. There’s also an element of intellectual challenge. What is this vase you are holding? Is it a Tang dynasty treasure worth thousands or a $2 tourist souvenir? My favorite thrift shop (only open on Thursdays) is in the basement of the local Congregational Church. It’s a feast for the eyes – and for the pocketbook. $10 will get you a shopping bag full of treasures – whether you need them or not.

POST #80: THE WIFE OF BATH – or, Look Who’s In My Attic!

Madame X,   38"x24", oil crayon on paper

I have a friend who used to be an English Lit major at Oxford. He’s fond of checking out my latest paintings and pronouncing them “Chaucerian;” (sometimes, he calls them “Rabelaisian.”)  My first (and last) contact with Chaucer (until recently) was Freshman Literature in college. The instructor put the entire class to sleep reciting unintelligible excerpts from the Canterbury Tales in 14^th century English. Who knew that Chaucer’s most memorable character, the Wife of Bath, would turn up decades later in my attic?

Madame Y, 38"x24", oil crayon on paper

Truthfully, I don’t have Chaucer (or Rabelais) in mind when I create formidable sex goddesses – they come out of my subconscious - although now that I have reread the Wife of Bath, I see where they originated.  I always thought I was satirizing popular culture: TV and video stars; they make the Wife of Bath (married/widowed five times) look like Saint Theresa. Chaucer’s character pretended to be pious, very cleverly using Christian dogma to justify her manipulation of men. Since a married woman could not own property in the thirteenth century – the husband took whatever wealth she had – the Wife of Bath learned how to use sexuality to control the men in her life, bragging about her impressive “equipment” and her ability to deploy it. Chaucer describes her as having a noticeable gap between her upper front teeth, a sign of sensuality in those days. A friend of mine, not knowing about the Wife of Bath, got her dentist to fill hers in. She now complains to me that men don’t come on to her as much as before, attributing it to advanced age; I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s the dental work.

"Lust" (from the "Seven Deadly Sins" series),
 68"x44", oil on canvas

Chaucer didn’t invent lusty, manipulative women, although he was probably the first “modern” writer to describe one. When women are powerless politically and economically, they use the weapons at hand.  Who can blame them? The Wife of Bath is, on rereading, rather despicable. Despite women’s recently-acquired “equality,” they still lack the political and social power of men and quickly learn to rely on looks and sexuality to get them what they want.

The first Wife of Bath I knew (although I never made the connection with Chaucer until recently) was my mother’s older sister, Tanta Natasha, a well-endowed Russian Jewish beauty. Like the much-married Wife of Bath, she had been married and widowed several times -and had God-only-knows how many lovers in between. She smoked, drank schnapps, flirted with men, told risque stories (which I didn’t understand) and quickly remarried after any of her husbands passed away. She taught all my cousins to smoke and encouraged them to have affairs. Although my mother detested her, I thought she was great and I’m sure she (not Chaucer) is the unconscious source of all the femme fatales who appear in my work.

POST #79: LISTENING TO PICASSO, or LOST IN TRANSLATION

When I met my husband many, many years ago, he gave me his precious copy of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. It was his way of “testing me,” checking to see if I was “wife material.” Anyhow, I was less than impressed with Rilke (although I wouldn’t dare tell him!) until I decided to try to read his work in the original German. Not that I could read German, but I knew enough to be able to sound the poems out. That’s when I realized how good Rilke was; like many poets (and writers), he probably got “lost in translation.”

Connected Mona Lisas (Picasso style)
Oil on Canvas       30"x40"

The Rilke incident came back to me yesterday when I started to write this post. I had finally gotten around to reading a book I have owned for many years called Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, put together by noted art historian, Dore Ashton. She begins, apologetically, by saying that Picasso refused to write about art (thank God!) but often held serious verbal discourses with his friends. Since all these quotes are based on their notes (memory is notoriously uncertain) plus translation from two, possibly three languages (Spanish to French to English), we have to take them with the proverbial grain of salt. Many, I must say, sound like something Picasso WOULD have said, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Here are some quotes I thought might interest you, ostensibly from the mouth of the master.

Have you ever seen a finished picture? To finish a work? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.

No, one doesn’t stop by oneself. You work and behind you stands somebody who is not a professional and it is he who makes the decisions.

Cubist Self Portrait
Oil on Canvas      38"x24"

Everyone wants to understand art. Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand it. Gertrude Stein joyfully announced to me the other day that she had at last understood what my picture of the three musicians was meant to be. It was a still life.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself. And to try to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote and even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things? 

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

Orgy Scene
Oil Sketch on Canvas    40"x48"

And my favorite (an explanation of a sketch on wrapping paper for a cut-metal sculpture):

It’s a chair, and you see that it is an explanation of cubism! Imagine a chair passed under the rollers of a compressor; it would turn out just about like that. 

Anyhow, the best part of my little book on Picasso aren’t his quotes but his drawings. Since they’re probably copyrighted, I didn’t want to use them so I rummaged through a couple of my old portfolios for some suitable drawings and damned if everything I ever did didn’t have a touch of Picasso in it!

As a friend of mine used to say (unoriginally): "If you're going to steal, steal from the best."

POST #78: EVERY ARTIST HAS TEN GOOD YEARS

A sculptor friend of mine was fond of saying that “every artist has ten good years.” I would argue with her, protest that this wasn’t so but her words scared me. What if she was right and my “best years” were over (or, worse yet, never going to happen.) Since I was teaching art history at the time, I set out to prove her mistaken. Instead, the more I looked into her theory, the more she appeared to be correct. Why are there only ten good years?

Untitled Street Scene I
Charcoal and oil stain on canvas. 67"x45"

Let’s examine the pattern:

First, few artists emerge from art school fully-formed. Most take at least ten years to find their own personal language and develop the technique and skills they need to build their reputation. Then there is the peak period, the time (the next ten years) in which they do their best work, the art for which they become known. After that there’s usually a period when they concentrate on buying property, marrying, having children, paying psychiatrists, cultivating dealers and collectors, living the “successful” artists’ life. This is the time in which artists tend to repeat themselves, lose their creative edge: divorce, drink, fritter away the talent that made them famous. And then, if they are lucky, there is a late period, when all is calm, the storms of life have past and the artist is free once more to concentrate on his or her work –  if he’s lucky.

Untitled Street Scene II
Charcoal and oil stain on canvas, 72"x67" 

I got to thinking about this subject because I am in the process of preparing a talk on Chagall. I wanted to concentrate on the work he produced from 1911 to 1915, the period he spent in Paris prior to World War I, but because I am part of a Judaic Studies lecture series, the sponsors asked me to focus on his years at the Yiddish Theater in Moscow, right after the Russian Revolution. By the time he fled Russia in 1922, he was famous and in my opinion, his best period was mostly over. The irony is that much of the work he did in Paris was lost, so we’ll never know the full story.

And so, I’ve been looking at the artwork I have stored in my attic. Are my ten best years ahead of me, behind me, or am I now in the middle of them? Or worse yet, am I never going to get there? I tend to think my “best” years were spread out: a year here, two years there. Then a crisis would occur in my life and I’d have to stop working. That’s why I’ll probably never “fulfill my potential” (assuming I have one.) In order to be a great artist (or even a consistently good one) you need to be able to set everything aside, ignore the needs of those around you and just create. If you try to be a well-rounded human being with a “life” you’re never going to get the unbroken time you need to fulfill your potential.

By the way, (in keeping with my theory) when Chagall did his best work in Paris c.1912, he was free of any personal obligations and distractions. He had a modest stipend, cheap housing (at La Ruche), no emotional entanglements, no wife or children, only a fiancée a thousand miles away. He stayed away from the other artists at his rooming house (whom he claimed copied him), socialized with poets and potential patrons, but mostly, holed up in his pie-shaped atelier and worked.